Saturday, June 14, 2014

A Dog Ate 2 years of Lois Lerner’s Emails. Now What?

So the IRS suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure and — lo and behold! – two years of Lois Lerner’s emails have vanished[1]: poof! Just like that. Imagine. Evidence of those happy days targeting conservative groups, gone. So much for the memoir. Eliana Johnson reports[2] that Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is really steamed. He has even asked the Justice Department to look into it. “The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” he said in a statement. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.”

Now, I actually might be able to help the IRS. When we lost a hard disk at my office with lots of archival material, we were pretty glum. But there are scads of data recovery companies whose entire business revolves around getting data off damaged hard disks. (“Recovering data from damaged hard disks” turned up 31,200,000 results in .36 seconds on the Google search I just performed.) I’m sure there are many such companies within a stone’s throw of the IRS. And here’s an offer: I’ll gladly pay personally to have the data recovered. Really. It’s only $1000 bucks, $2000 tops, and I’d pay a lot more than that to know what was in those emails. Wouldn’t you?

But here’s the thing. After we lost that hard disk, we wised up and started backing up. We have redundant backups in our office and offsite back ups as well. And we’re a tiny company with no IT department. The IRS commands the resources of the federal government and as much of your money as it chooses to glom on to. Is it credible that they have no backups of two years’ worth of emails of a senior staff person—a senior staff person who just happens to be at the center of a huge scandal? What do you think?

I have a couple of other questions. 1. How will the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the extended White House public relations team cover this story? Will they cover it? And 2. What will it take to rouse the public from its supine attitude of hapless acquiescence to this administration’s increasingly brazen lawlessness? I almost tire of reciting the litany, but here it is, part of it, once again, on the next page:

What would Obama have to do to lose the confidence of the people? Rob a bank? His economic policies have robbed society of more than any bank has on deposit. Murder someone? Ask the families of Chris Stevens and the other people slaughtered at Benghazi what they think about the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.

I wish I knew the answers to these questions. It seems to me that the scandals emanating from this administration are coming faster and faster. Where is the Fourth Estate? Where are the people? I wish I knew.